When the Normans first came into England, the town of Cam-Bridge, or Grant-Bridge, was not the stately town which we have seen it since, nor was it the flourishing place which it had been in the time of the Saxon Heptarchy.[165] According to the Venerable Bede, Sebert, or Sigebert, King of the East Angles, by the advice of Felix the Bishop, instituted within his kingdom a school for learning, in imitation of what he had seen in France; and this school is believed to have been fixed on the very spot where the town of Cam-Bridge now stands.[166] Others there are who say that a school had flourished there in the time of the Romans, and that Sebert, or Sigebert, only restored this school in the year of our Lord six hundred and thirty. Certain it is that from a very early time Cam-Bridge was the residence of many students, who at first lived in apartments hired of the townspeople, and afterwards in inns or hostels of their own, where they formed separate communities, of which each was under its own head or principal. But in the fiery distraction of the Danish invasion of England, when abbats and monks and religious women were slaughtered at the feet of their own altars, and churches and abbeys and monasteries consumed, the pagan flames fell upon this quiet seat of learning, and left nothing behind but ashes and ruins. After this the place lay a long time neglected. There are some who write that when, about the year of grace nine hundred and twenty, King Edward, surnamed the Elder, and the eldest son and successor of Alfred the Great, repaired the ravages of the Danes at Cam-Bridge, he erected halls for students, and appointed learned professors; but these facts appear to be questionable, and it is thought that, although learning would no more abandon the place than the waters of the river Cam would cease to flow by it, the scholars were in a poor and insecure condition, and were living not in the halls or colleges of stately architecture, but under the thatched roofs of the humble burghers, when the blast of the Norman trumpets was first heard in the land. At that sound all humane studies were suspended. The town and territory round it were bestowed upon a Norman chief, and Norman men-at-arms were quartered in the houses which had lodged the students. But it was not until the third year after the battle of Hastings, when Duke William became sorely alarmed at the great strength of the Saxons, gathered or still gathering in the neighbouring isle of Ely, that Cam-Bridge felt to their full extent the woes attendant on wars and foreign conquest. Then it was made a great military station, and a castle was built to lodge more soldiers, and command and control the town and all the vicinity. Just beyond the river Cam, and opposite to the little township, there stood, as there still stands, a lofty barrow or mound of earth,[167] overgrown with green sward, and looking like those mounds which the traveller observes by Salisbury plains, and on the